Narrated by Veida Dehmlow
Every time I look at Audible’s list of new/upcoming releases, I see more and more new names listed among the narrators. Like many listeners, I’m fairly cautious about trying out new narrators, but fortunately for me, because of my association with AudioGals, I’m able to give some of them a try, and , I hope, to enable others to decide whether to try them too.
Ms. Dehmlow has a handful of titles to her credit at Audible, and as her name has popped up as narrator on a couple of recent historical romances, I thought I would listen to one of them.
How to Tame Your Duke 
The story is set towards the end of the nineteenth century with the three princesses of a little-known (and completely imaginary) German principality escaping their homeland with their lives after the assassination of their father and the eldest sister’s husband. Their uncle is the powerful Duke of Olympia (an odd appellation for an English duke which immediately made me think of a tube stop on the District Line!) and he arranges for each of the sisters to be hidden away while he makes inquiries, tries to find out who is behind the murders, and bring them to justice. As the story progresses, it emerges that Olympia is more than just a member of the British aristocracy; he’s some kind of 19th century “M”, a spymaster with fingers in many pies and contacts everywhere.
The heroine of this book is middle sister Emilie, the bookish, bespectacled one who secretly longs for adventure. Well, she certainly finds it when she is packed off into the wilds of Yorkshire to serve as tutor to the sixteen-year-old Marquess of Silverton, the son of the reclusive Duke of Ashland. And yes, I did say “tutor” and not “governess”. The fact that the sisters have survived and are still at large is widely known, and Olympia hits upon the idea of disguising them as men to keep them hidden while he makes his investigations.
It’s at this point that my interest would normally be flagging as I started to wonder what on earth would cause a supposedly intelligent man such as Olympia to believe that a pair of trousers and some glue-on whiskers will make his nieces turn into nephews in the eyes of everyone else. But the setup was intriguing enough for me to want to continue, and I admit that I did enjoy the scene shortly afterwards in which Emilie meets her charge for the first time as by then, I’d decided to allow the large stretch required of my credibility and to go with the flow.
My first impressions of Ms. Dehmlow’s narration were mostly positive. She is naturally softly-spoken and her voice is pleasantly musical. Her reading is well-modulated and generally well-paced, but even by this early stage in the story, it was apparent that her character voices were going to leave something to be desired.
Ms. Dehmlow’s voice does not have a particularly wide range in terms of pitch, so her male and female voices were not always clearly defined. She adopts a certain gruffness in her voicing of Ashland, and brings a lightness of tone and a lot of humor to her interpretation of Freddie, but other than that, there was sometimes little in the way of differentiation between the sexes and in later scenes involving both Ashland and Olympia, I often had to rely on the author’s textual indicators to tell me who was speaking.
Emile very quickly becomes infatuated with her employer, the large and very battle-scarred Duke of Ashland, a man who returned from war so (as he thinks) horribly disfigured as to make him unfit to appear in society. He’s an attractive, albeit rather imposing, hero. Caring, honourable, and noble of intention, he clearly dotes on his son and wants him to be happy. In fact, the father/son relationship is one of the highlights of the book, as Freddie’s good-natured teasing does much to humanize Ashland, who might otherwise come across as rather dour.
It seems that Ashland has a regular monthly assignation at the local hotel, and of course both Freddie and “Mr Grimsby” assume he is meeting a woman for an evening of frolicking between the sheets. But when Emilie (having resumed female clothing in order to meet with her ex-governess to exchange news at the same hotel) is mistaken for Ashland’s lady of the evening, she discovers that the funsome frolics are not what she had at first assumed and that instead, all he requires is an evening spent in the company of a woman who will not spurn him because of his ravaged appearance.
It’s at this point that another rather large suspension of disbelief is required in order to allow that Ashland could not possibly see or hear any similarities between his son’s rather effete tutor and the lady he comes to know as “Emily”, although to be fair, the author does her best to make it vaguely plausible.
Once past that, however, what follows is a well-crafted love story, as the two leads come to know each other as they truly are beneath their disguises. The sexual tension is well and truly crackling as they continue their innocent (in deed, if not in thought!) assignations until one evening when it becomes impossible for them to pretend any more that they are not overwhelmingly attracted to each other.
There are a number of love scenes which are by turns, explosive and heatedly sensual. I don’t usually go into great detail when it comes to the narration of the sex scenes as I think that, like one’s preference when it comes to reading them, listening to them is just as intensely subjective. But given I’m trying to give a rounded description of the work of a newer narrator, I will say that on the whole, I think Ms. Dehmlow’s performance of the various sex scenes in this story was reasonably good. She certainly threw herself right into the spirit of the thing, although there were at least a couple of times when I thought she took things a bit too far and made me giggle rather than want to go and stick my head in the fridge! That said however, she did strike the right note most of the time, and her voice certainly lends itself well to breathy moans and gasping orgasms!
On the whole, listening How to Tame Your Duke was an enjoyable experience. The story was intriguing, the romance was well developed and the main characters were engaging and well written, especially Freddie, who I thought was a real standout.
Ms. Dehmlow did a good enough job as to not discourage me from listening to her again, although I think she still has a way to go to make my “I will listen to this narrator regardless of what they read” list. Her character differentiation is somewhat limited and she wasn’t completely successful when it came to delivering a Yorkshire accent as spoken by most of the servants in the household. It’s difficult to explain in words exactly what didn’t work, but it has to do with the way people from that part of the country often omit the word “the” from their speech. It’s often written down as “t’” instead of “the” – for example:
“And do you know what t’morning post do say today?” The other maid bounced in her chair. “They think t’princesses came to England!”
– but it’s not pronounced. Instead, it’s sounded almost like a glottal stop, so hearing every “t’” pronounced did get a bit irritating.
But I realize that for many listeners, that will be a minor issue.
To sum up – if you can suspend your disbelief enough to accept the whole “girl-in-trousers” scenario, then How to Tame Your Duke is an enjoyable story with a deeply felt romance at its heart. While I did have some reservations, I would certainly consider listening to more of Ms. Dehmlow’s work in the romance genre.
Caz
Narration: B-
Book Content: B-
Steam Factor: For your burning ears only
Violence: Minimal
Genre: Historical Romance
Publisher: Tantor Audio
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